You don't need to; of the 4 times I've played it, three of them were won with hoarder and the other one was played with the express intent of doing nothing but converting stuff and getting swift-hands kills. The level is still the easiest of the challenges even when not playing as goblin.

I think you need to get in early with Stone Soup sometimes to get the most out of him.

I feel Stone Soup isn't worth using at all. Binlor is not hard to earn piety with, and I'd rather have the edible morsels of XP.

I'm thinking of monotheist Binlor play where you are in danger of exhausting the dungeon's supply of walls. (If you're just farming Binlor for piety, I agree that eating walls is the better approach, and Earthmother -> Binlor is maybe superior to pure Binlor if you have the choice, even with Rock Heart.) You have to do it early of course, level 3 at the latest I would say. What makes it worthwhile is that you gain piety AND walls, whereas destroying walls for piety becomes counter-productive at some point. You also gain the IMAWAL XP bonus for your next kill, I think. Binlor can make up for the lost popcorn under the right circumstances - firstly you spend some piety right then and there to power through a huge XP catapult, and secondly, all those extra boons can really add up in the boss fight.

I'm thinking of monotheist Binlor play where you are in danger of exhausting the dungeon's supply of walls

You're more likely to run out of walls because Binlor's boons remove them then because you were smashing them to generate piety. Secondly, unless you need to go nuts with Stone Heart to break down a 75% resist boss there aren't even enough repeatable Binlor boons available to knock out that many walls.

I don't see a point to going "monotheism" Binlor, especially if you find him early. Unless you desperately need stone skin against the boss (in which case racking up magic resistance doesn't help you, so you won't be racking up as many boons and won't run into wall limitations), converting out just makes too much sense, and saving popcorn for a mid-battle level-up is too big a sacrifice in my view.

Fair enough. I suppose I tend to stick to one god at the moment because I'm seeing how far I can push them individually, rather than because it's the optimal strategy. I'd still say you can get good mileage out of the Rock Heart + boon mana refill in the late game, even as the boons themselves become less important, but without Rock Heart there's definitely only so far you can sensibly take Binlor before it becomes better to reinvest all that piety elsewhere. (As an aside, I don't like the way the Paladin's Monotheism trait is pure pain at the moment, even if he deserves the nerf overall - it just seems to encourage faithless Paladins, which doesn't make much sense.)

I find Taurog's inventory hogging amusing, but it is a bit extreme. How about for each boon, Taurog makes one of your slots into a 'no glyph' slot.

Using ENDISWALL to pump resistances is only really practical if you have poison, otherwise you can't get enough mana to recast it every hit. ENDISWALL + binlor lets you get might which erodes resistances and also offsets the Gorgon's damage penalty. You can also farm piety. Stone heart gives +50% endiswalls for moar piety/resistance boosting. Once you are out of dark tiles binlor + stone heart gives you +20 mana. With the default mana boosters that'll give you 20 more burndarayz if there are enough walls left and assuming you have 100 piety. That's after you've been eroding their resistances with might AND every time you recharge mana they lose 5% resist on top of that.